nHancer Utility For Nvidia Card Users,

[Siggi 10]

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Or back up to the earlier version if they were working better for you. That's what I'd do. I hate triangles when I'm flying, unless I'm eating Doritos.

 

.

 

I'm embarrassed to admit I don't recall the earlier ones, or I'd have done it already.

[Bigfish3 0]

Lou, thanks very much for this really helpful post. I just installed nHancer and copied your settings, and the improvement is significant - all that shimmering in trees etc. has gone. I'm just in midst of chucking out the venerable E6750 and installing an E8400 and new memory with a view to overclocking it to @3.6Ghz+, so soon it should be the dog's knackers!! Such pleasure from such small things.

 

BTW I read that the latest set of drivers (196.21) have some bug which creates problems for overclocking. Anyone know if this is true or if it matters? Before I joined the ranks of overclockers none of this would have worried me!

[Von Paulus 8]

I'm embarrassed to admit I don't recall the earlier ones, or I'd have done it already.

You might have a folder called Nvidia in your primary HD with all the versions you've downloaded and installed. I'm not 100% sure because, I don't have a Nvidia since a year and my memory isn't the same has a couple years ago. That folder is created when you run Nvidia installation drivers, for decompress them.

[Siggi 10]

You might have a folder called Nvidia in your primary HD with all the versions you've downloaded and installed. I'm not 100% sure because, I don't have a Nvidia since a year and my memory isn't the same has a couple years ago. That folder is created when you run Nvidia installation drivers, for decompress them.

 

You clever bugger, you're right. Ha!

 

Cheers Paulus.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

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SWEET! WTG VP. Siggi owes you a pinta' at the very least for that little tip.

 

 

.

[Siggi 10]

Nuts, the OS tried to automatically reinstall the drivers after I rebooted and I couldn't stop it. So I ran Driver Sweeper at the same time just to be bloody minded, but that didn't do anything but vanish all the older drivers in the folder VP pointed out. Anyway, I did a clean reinstall of the same drivers, no difference to the triangles. At least I know what the old drivers were called now, I'll get around to hunting them down on the net at some point.

 

Why does every driver update from NVidia have to be a game of russian bloody roulette? They break things as often as they improve them. Farking morons.

[Von Paulus 8]

At least I know what the old drivers were called now, I'll get around to hunting them down on the net at some point.

 

You don't have to look very far away frm the place where you each time download a new set of drivers.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

[Herr Prop-Wasche 7]

BTW I read that the latest set of drivers (196.21) have some bug which creates problems for overclocking. Anyone know if this is true or if it matters? Before I joined the ranks of overclockers none of this would have worried me!

I found this at the nVidia drivers page for their beta 196.34 driver:

 

New in Version 196.34

• Fixed a bug with v196.21 that prohibited GPU overclocking.

[Kamikaze 0]

Just a note on an issue I ran into in upgrading my NVIDIA drivers and OFF. I'm running Windows7 (64bit) and was not using nHancer (have in the past though) but wanted to try it again. After upgrading the drivers and adding in nHancer and doing a reboot . . just in case . .and using the OFF config util . . . OFF would not fly! It seemed to run, but in both campaigns and quickmissions when it gets to the portions with the pictures (rictofen,maddock (I think), and one other) which is just before you are on the field it would bounce me back to the main campaing or quickflight screen.

 

I solved it by doing the OFF RESET which is in the WORKSHOPS menu. The downside of this is you will loose all your current campaign/pilot data :( But OFF with my system OFF then at seemed to work correctly.

 

Off Topic : for those that are thinking of overclocking . . make sure you have plenty of cooling going on in your system! And run some sort of heat monitoring software (Everst for example). Overclocked RAM . . if you go beyond what it can handle will corrupt your data which can possibly lead to having to rebuild your whole system . . and loosing ALL your data (my documents, my music, my photos . . etc.). Use Memtest (its free) to check your new memory settings! Going too far with video will give you visual artifacts first . . . before the chip fries. Just be VERY cautious! You may have to open your case and place an exteriour fan close to it blowing in to add the extra needed cooling.

 

Hell! I dont overclock and have to do that with my two 8800GTXs in SLI . . . especially in the summer.

 

Just food for thought. Back on topic. Sorry for the tangent but I saw several folks talking about this and felt a warning should be said.

[Tamper 9]

My sliders are at 5 for everything bar the terrain, which is at 4. I've had triangle-free performance at those settings before.

 

My specs:

 

Asus Maximus Formula mobo.

E8400 Intel CPU at 4ghz.

Corsair Dominator 1066 RAM at 891.

GTX 285 Graphics.

Fatality Gamer sound.

 

 

Hey Siggi,

 

I've been thinking about your situation; you run a similar machine to mine (e8400-3.8G/4G Corsair Dominator 1066 at ~932 (IIRC)/GTX260/216). But I noticed something you actually don't list in your specs.

 

For a few different reasons - not the least of which was the absolutely deplorable load times of TOWWOFS ("The Other WWOne Flight Sim") - a while back I decided to change my mass media storage subsystem (that's what normal people ordinarily call a "hard drive" lol). It happened that a local retailer was having a sale on SSD's - so I bought 2 30G OCZ Vertex SSDs and built a 60G RAID 0 array.

 

[Now, before everyone gets all excited and tells me about how I wasted my money and they're going to get slower over time, and/or that games don't benefit much from RAID, yada-yada..trust me, I know exactly what I'm doing. This was more an experiment than anything else] Anyway...

 

I was, of course, impressed with the overall performance increase (compared to my prior single-drive, run-o'-the-mill, Maxtor SATA II drive). But, it still is in essence *not* a 'true' RAID setup (on-board RAID; uses 'soft' controller), and the SSD's are fast but not without some limits.

 

But the one thing I seemed to have gotten out of the deal is that any stuttering I may have had, plus the rare-but-still-there triangles you mentioned...well, it was all gone.

 

In fact, I've come to wonder that as much as a reasonably fast CPU (which we both have), video card (which we both have) and memory (again, we both have) *ALL* do matter...the oft-overlooked component is the mass media storage subsystem (there's that term again). Realistically, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, or the graphics card, or the memory...the one thing that has to 'feed' all these components with textures, and pronto, is the hard drive.

 

And - as I'm sure you know - hard drives are by far the absolute slowest devices in computers, and have been for a long time (remember "RAM drives?").

 

To make a long story boring I wondered what kind of mass media storage subsystem you have. Now, I did note you said you "had triangle-free performance" before, but that might be explained by a lot of things that could all come back to your hard disk. I wondered if you'd considered this and/or what you thought about the idea?

 

Also, may I presume you a. keep the drive defragmented, b. keep plenty of free space on it, and c. know how your paging file/'virtual memory' is setup? (These all change over time, depending, and can do so without the user knowing anything about it).

 

For instance, my paging file is currently set for 'system managed' and is about 7GB. It has always been my understanding that what Windows does if it's set for 'system managed' is 1.5 times physical memory or 50% free space, whichever is less - it is dynamic, of course.

 

Anyway - any thoughts?

Edited February 20, 2010 by Tamper

[Bigfish3 0]

Herr Prop-Wasche, many thanks for the heads up on revised NVidia drivers - of course I should have realised an NVidia driver bug could only affect GPU (not CPU) overclocking, which I'm not messing about with.

 

Kamikaze, thanks for your warning about the dangers of overheating through overclocking. I am a complete novice at overclocking - succeeded at it only through careful hand-holding on the part of Marine over in the BoB2 forum. At the moment the two cores are running at 28C & 16C no matter what I do with the PC, but then it has got 5 fans going full blast inc. a Zalman on the CPU, and its in the loft space in the garage with an ambient temperature of @2C!! May be a tad warmer up there in July! I've got the E8400 running comfortably without changing any voltages at 3.7GHz. I gather 4Ghz is possible. Or perhaps I'll just leave well alone now ....

[Siggi 10]

Hey Siggi,

 

I've been thinking about your situation; you run a similar machine to mine (e8400-3.8G/4G Corsair Dominator 1066 at ~932 (IIRC)/GTX260/216). But I noticed something you actually don't list in your specs.

 

For a few different reasons - not the least of which was the absolutely deplorable load times of TOWWOFS ("The Other WWOne Flight Sim") - a while back I decided to change my mass media storage subsystem (that's what normal people ordinarily call a "hard drive" lol). It happened that a local retailer was having a sale on SSD's - so I bought 2 30G OCZ Vertex SSDs and built a 60G RAID 0 array.

 

[Now, before everyone gets all excited and tells me about how I wasted my money and they're going to get slower over time, and/or that games don't benefit much from RAID, yada-yada..trust me, I know exactly what I'm doing. This was more an experiment than anything else] Anyway...

 

I was, of course, impressed with the overall performance increase (compared to my prior single-drive, run-o'-the-mill, Maxtor SATA II drive). But, it still is in essence *not* a 'true' RAID setup (on-board RAID; uses 'soft' controller), and the SSD's are fast but not without some limits.

 

But the one thing I seemed to have gotten out of the deal is that any stuttering I may have had, plus the rare-but-still-there triangles you mentioned...well, it was all gone.

 

In fact, I've come to wonder that as much as a reasonably fast CPU (which we both have), video card (which we both have) and memory (again, we both have) *ALL* do matter...the oft-overlooked component is the mass media storage subsystem (there's that term again). Realistically, it doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, or the graphics card, or the memory...the one thing that has to 'feed' all these components with textures, and pronto, is the hard drive.

 

And - as I'm sure you know - hard drives are by far the absolute slowest devices in computers, and have been for a long time (remember "RAM drives?").

 

To make a long story boring I wondered what kind of mass media storage subsystem you have. Now, I did note you said you "had triangle-free performance" before, but that might be explained by a lot of things that could all come back to your hard disk. I wondered if you'd considered this and/or what you thought about the idea?

 

Also, may I presume you a. keep the drive defragmented, b. keep plenty of free space on it, and c. know how your paging file/'virtual memory' is setup? (These all change over time, depending, and can do so without the user knowing anything about it).

 

For instance, my paging file is currently set for 'system managed' and is about 7GB. It has always been my understanding that what Windows does if it's set for 'system managed' is 1.5 times physical memory or 50% free space, whichever is less - it is dynamic, of course.

 

Anyway - any thoughts?

 

Hi Tamper.

 

Yep, I have a few thoughts. I looked into SSDs during the short time I was into ArmA2 and trying to get that snake-pit of botched code running at a satisfactory speed, but the bang-for-buck ratio didn't appeal.

 

I currently have three SATA drives, OS running from one, games from another and the Pagefile from the third. As I understand it everything a game like OFF needs is pulled from the drive and put into both video-RAM and system-RAM. I have 2gb of S-RAM and 1gb of V-RAM. Seemes that used to be enough for stutter and triangle-free play, which is why I blame the current drivers for my woes. And since getting FRAPS to store it's output to the E drive (where the pagefile is as it happens) I can now get good performance while filming in another game I play (Darkest Hour, haven't tried with OFF yet), so the three-drive spread improved that particulasr problem I was having. I have defrag running on auto, does it's thing every night. I guess I have my system running about as well as it can, dodgy video drivers excepted. My S-RAM is now at 1069 (lifetime gauranteed, so I thought "screw it, why not...").